THE PRESIDEN1 A.K.A. CHICKY BOY The atmosphere of intImidation that surrounded Sinatra was reflected in the jokes of the Vegas comedians. Shecky Greene: "Frank Sinatra once saved my life. I was jumped by a bunch of guys in the parking lot and they were hitting me and beating me with blackjacks when Frank walked over and said, 'That's h b ' " D Ri kl " C ' enoug, oys. on c es: mon, Frank, be yourself. Hit somebod)T." Jackie Mason doesn't know what he did to of- fend Sinatra, but while he was playing the Aladdin Hotel in the early eighties, Sinatra came onstage after Mason's set and began berating him. " 'The jerk-off rabbi.' 'Who the fuck is he?' This, that, ' F k h . ", M " I d ' uc 1m, ason says. on t even know what happened All I know is that a couple of weeks later, I opened the door of a car-ping!-a fist came in and busted me in the nose and before I could open my eyes he disappeared. I asked a lot of wise guys. They didn't say it was Sinatra. In my heart of hearts, I think it must have come from Sinatra" Even if Sinatra's menace wasn't verifiable, it was part of his aura-a rough justice under- lined by his friendship with punks and Presidents T HE most powerful among Sinatra's powerful friends was, of course, John E Kennedy, for whom he acted as both fund-raiser and pander. The fun- loving Kennedy, whom Sinatra nick- named Chicky Boy, enjoyed carousing with Sinatra's star-studded cronies; Sina- tra repaid the honor of the association by calling his clique the Jack Pack, for a brief time, and even introduced Ken- nedy to one of his girlfriends, Judith Campbell. Sinatra got to visit Hyannis Port, to travel in the President's private plane, and to cruise with the President on the Honey Fitz; he escorted Jackie Kennedy, who didn't want him in the White House, to the inaugural gala he'd organized. If Kennedy's high rank confirmed the brightness of Sinatra's star, the darkness of Sinatra's past was confirmed by the wise guys he was drawn to. Over the years, Sinatra rubbed shoulders with a gallery of hoodlums: Willie Moretti, Joe Fischetti, Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gam- bino, and, especially; Sam Giancana, who was the head of the Chicago mob in the fifties, and who called Sinatra the Ca- naf)T. Part of Sinatra's freewheeling im- pudence came from the wIsdom of the underclass-the knowledge that crime was free enterprise turned upside down and that there was a slim difference be- tween being a killer and making a killing. "If what you do is honest and you make it, you're a hero," Sinatra said. "If what you do is crooked and you make it, you're a bum. Me-I grabbed a song." Sinatra walked a thin line between respectability and rapacií)T. He had learned the man- ners of the ruling class, and he owned all their pleasures; what the mobsters offered him was the flip side-their lack of pro- prieí)T. They lived the darkness that Sina- tra,s bright public persona could only hint at in song. "He was in awe of them," Bacall says. "He thought they were fabulous. " Onstage, where the association gave Sinatra an aroma of toughness and men- ace, he sometimes joked about the wise guys; offstage, he was loath to talk. When Hamill first raised the touchy issue of the mobsters with Sinatra, Sina- tra said only, "If I talk about some of those other guys, someone might come knockin' at my fuckin' door." But he later went on, "I spent a lot of time working in saloons. . . . I was a kid. . . . They paid you, and the checks didn't bounce. I didn't meet any Nobel Prize winners in saloons. But if Francis of Assisi was a singer and worked in saloons, he would've met the same guys." A nineteen-page Justice Department memorandum prepared in 1962 suggests that Sinatra had contact with about ten major hoodlums, some of whom had his unlisted number As a result, Sinatra has become, in Hamill's words, "the most investigated American performer since John Wilkes Booth." The press wanted to see corruption in Sinatra's connection to the Mob, although none has ever been proved; in any case, it's not cash but comfort that the Mob really offered Sinatra. In the company of these violent men, he was not judged for his own vio- lent nature; in the context of their igno- rance, his lack of education didn't mat- - Q = - -<'-. -::J 93 ter. He could drop the carapace of so- phistication and embrace his shadow. T HE epigraph to one of his daughter's books about him quotes Sinatra as saying, "Maybe there might be value to a firefly; or an instant-long Roman candle." Sinatra's voice, as he well knows, put a lasting glow on six decades of American life and three generations of fans. Sinatra stumped for ED.R., who invited him to the White House; he was still around to sing at the inaugural gala of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. His was a voice for all po- litical seasons. In the forties, with "The Song Is You,"' or Nothing at All," and "I'll Never Smile Again," he tranquillized the nation; in the fifties boom, he was the slaphappy sound of good times ("Young at Heart," "Come Fly with Me," "Oh! Look at Me Now!"); in the sixties, he ushered in the optimism of the Kennedy era with ' the Way;" "The Best Is Yet to Come," and '"High Hopes"; and even into the eighties Sinatra was singing the tune of the smug, self-aggrandizing Rea- gan years with "My Wa)T." Over all those decades, Sinatra con- tinually struggled to make his sound cur- rent. In the sixties, for example, under his own banner at Reprise, he produced a few great albums; at the same time, al- most imperceptibly, as popular musical tastes underwent a seismic shift, Sinatra's records began to deteriorate into pick- up albums-collections of singles, like "That's Life" and, a particularly lazy effort, "Sinatra's Sinatra," in which he just rerecorded his Capitol songs. (This prompted Jonathan Schwartz to joke, "Reprise Records, whIch Sinatra said stood for 'to play and play again,' really stood for 'to record and record again.''') Times were changing, and Sinatra had to work to stay fresh. He tried bossa nova with the Brazilian Antonio Carlos Jobim; he mined the jazz seam in collab- orations with Duke Ellington and Count Basie, which led to his touring with the Basie band and recording three albums with Basie, including the thrilling live album "Sinatra at the Sands." By the mid-sixties, however, with the advent of the Beatles and the British invasion, radio stations had been colonized by rock and roll. One night, waiting to go on in Las Vegas, Sinatra looked at the audience and said to Jimmy Van Heusen, beside him, "Look at that. Why won't they buy the records?" "Of course, they were buy-